Archive for May, 2011

When I got my first apartment after moving out of my parents’ I went full-on junior high with wall-to-wall magazine page paneling that pulled heavily from the old TWS photo issues with lots of full-bleeds, “Sightings” and now-vintage DCSHOECOUSA ads. Jim Greco’s switch kickflip down the old Med Choice gap in the Nirvana shirt was featured, and I think a Neal Mims roof gap 360 flip. This is one of several reasons I could not run a scans blog, alongside a fuzzboxed memory bank when it comes to who had ads in what issue and generally being shitty at scanning I think. But on top of the Cory Kennedy sequence from the Transworld below there were at least four pages I’d tear out of the new Skateboard Mag if I was doing up a new wall, starting with this Ryan Lay 5-0 — the perilously close-to-the-wall switch b/s lipslide a few pages later is another one* and so is Anthony Schultz’s bump-to-fence blaster on page 112. Anybody care to guess what the fourth one is?

*They’d have to be on different sides of the room though because I’m not about to put two photos of the same dude right next to one another, bad form etc

Witness above Cory Kennedy, doing it big with a backside tailslide to kickflip to backside tailslide again (to fakie), on a bench painted orange to represent the fiery heat he is bringing to this technical skating game. Maybe you bugged out when you saw this trick but I plan to tell you I bugged out twice as hard because 1. I spent at least 30 minutes last winter attempting to do this exact same trick on EA Skate 2*, and 2. probably that was longer than it took the supernaturally powered Cory Kennedy to actually do it in real life. Some Joey Brezinski brainwave maybe, but I’m looking forward to hopefully getting a look at the un-Ty Evans’ed footage to see how fast he came off the second leg. Now and then I gotta sit myself down and reason out how come I continue to subscribe to TWS, between what seems like the first quarter of the magazine given over to schilling for advertisers’ products, an editorial tone that reminds me of a former roommates’ issues of “Maxim” and a kinda predictable cycle of promotion for their video offerings, and photos like this are a useful reminder.

*The spot I chose to bang my head against this particular wall was in EA Skate 2’s “Old Town” (behind the character in this pic), and in my defense I was working with a 90-degree elbow in the ledge, or maybe that’s no defense at all because it woulda been way more doable with a gentler angle. Live and learn

Is it fitting that this clip promoting an upcoming Torey Pudwill web video feature, set to launch July 4 in honor of the U.S. declaration of independence, could be run through a black-and-white filter and pasted into one of Dan Wolfe’s mid-90s Philadelphia stories? Pudwill’s special meter is a lot of times topped out on hyper technical slide-to-flip-to-slides or whatever but he gets bonus points here for channeling some Forbes/Barley/Oyola power basics with no pushing. The quick set up for the kickflip, height on the smith grind and lateness of the b/s 180 make me wonder if this is the best run Torey Pudwill has done since that one in the DVS “Dudes Dudes Dudes” vid with the rainbow wallride. It would be cool if he made a whole part that was like this.

Watching the Real video it’s hard not to be impressed by the primal forces of Peter Ramondetta’s skate tricks. Tattooed, bearded and occasionally bloodied, he applies a heavy-handed power to the switch ollie over that big gray hubba or the hurting he puts on those big cement steps (b/s 5-0, b/s nosegrind, switch b/s kickflip). Peter Ramondetta impresses himself on semi tractor trailors and doorways, jamming the nose of his board between pillars on that one frontside blunt. His one-man legacy of brutality is maybe highlighted most by several punishing tricks executed upon a girly pink ledge.

If you were to draw up a spectrum of such squishy concepts it would maybe be possible to put light-footed dandies such as Richard Mulder, Ronnie Creager and Austyn Gillette on one end and bruiser types such as Salman Agah, Mic-E Reyes and James Kelch on the other. You could appoint someone like Peter Ramondetta to carry on this line, a red-blooded male archetype rooted in the themes and lifestyle embodied by the animal-hunting writer Ernest Hemingway. He swilled liquor, loved women and upheld the ancient tradition of bull-slaying, a truly ancient tradition.

Peter Ramondetta has yet to make public his position on bulls and their potential slaying. This is not in the Real video, unless it’s in the bonus features not featured in my iTunes edition that doesn’t possess chapter divisions either. By all accounts his lifestyle has tamed since the days of squalor at Six Newell where Elissa Steamer and Frank Gerwer presided over a household of decay. Ramondetta is not famed as a trophy fisherman or dangerous game hunter, unless you count that downhill handrail toward the end and that last hill with the treacherous speed bumper and all those cars with their wheels turned curb-ward. But you get the feeling that, if the situation called for it, this dude has it in him to walk up to a group of reporters covering his supposed death, run down the situation and spend the next few days catching up on his own premature obituaries.

Wound down the evening tonight skipping through EST 4 for a long-lost Josh Kalis line at Philadelphia city hall that ends in a switch b/s lipslide down a fabricated handrail. Eventually found it and clicked back to watch it a couple more times before letting it play through and then confronting this. Blinked a few times, wasn’t sure how to respond. Still not sure to be honest

I was still tripping out on this Justin Figueroa switch backside 50-50, on a round handrail that’s I think in Australia, when a pal put me onto this equally nutty switch b/s 5-0 from Joe Gavin on the front of this new Sidewalk issue. You may recall this blog-space’s affection for switch backside trick covers most recently arising during last year’s TWS appearance by P-Rod, so this is a good month.

Second perhaps only to the earth-shaking development that Usama Bin Laden had been discovered and killed in a high-value military operation was last night’s surprise emergence, pictured above, of Krooked Skateboards pro Bobby Worrest as a conservative commentator on Fox News Channel. Worrest, as he publicly hailed the elimination of Bin Laden as a terrorist threat to the U.S. and other sovereign locales around the globe, immediately fueled speculation that he had effectively thrown his hat into the ring to represent the views of extreme/conservative sportists in the coming election cycle.

By anteing up as such an “ambassador” of goodwill and bridge-constructor between the worlds of action sports and Republican thought, Worrest’s move also served to flag a coming generational shift in the role, held for more than a decade by Danny Way who has long embraced traditional family values. Way in the past 10 years has pushed to broaden his brief by traveling to emerging markets such as China, whose Giant Wall he leaped in 2005 to symbolize the converging paths of the Earth’s two remaining superpowers.

Worrest’s high-stakes gambit to situate himself as the prime mouthpiece of “Y” Generation skaters could brew turmoil among conservative ranks, which are seen reluctant to let go of Way, a proven performer who captured the galactic land speed record for skateboarding a few years ago. Worrest’s unshaven appearance is said to have ruffled feathers among senior party officials and he continues to be viewed by many as a classical “beltway insider” since he grew up less than an hour from Washington D.C.

Explaining his views on U.S. military commando operations abroad, Bobby Worrest in 2009 told ESPN Sports that the movie character John Rambo is “a big inspiration.”